Their work "clearly demonstrates that at least five and as many as nine species of tropical fruit flies, including the infamous Medfly, are permanently established in California and inexorably spreading, despite more than 30 years of intervention and nearly 300 state-sponsored eradication programs aimed at the flies," wrote Pat Bailey in a UC Davis News Service story released today.

The findings, Bailey pointed out, have "significant implications for how government agencies develop policies to successfully manage pests that pose a threat to California's $43.5 billion agricultural industry."

Carey, an international authority on fruit-fly invasion biology, told her that "Despite due diligence, quick responses, and massive expenditures to prevent entry and establishment of these insects, virtually all of the fruit-fly species targeted by eradication projects have been reappearing in the same locations — several of them annually — and gradually spreading in the state."

Carey, Papadopoulos and Plant detailed the problem in the opening paragraph of their meticulously researched paper: "Since 1954 when the first tropical tephritid fruitfly was detected in California, a total of 17 species in four genera and 11,386 individuals (adults/larvae) have been detected in the state at more than 3348 locations in 330 cities." That's three out of four California cities.

Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology: "The study has dramatic implications for California agriculture and the state’s international trading partners, and speaks to the urgent need to alter current eradication policies aimed at invasive species."

Frank Zalom, UC Davis entomology professor and incoming president of the 6500-member Entomological Society of America: “This study deserves serious consideration, and I hope that it helps lead to new discussions on a long-term approach for dealing with fruit flies and similar exotic pests by the United States and international regulatory authorities."

Former UC Davis chancellor Ted Hullar (1987-1994), one of the first to believe in "the science" that Carey presented, said: “From our first conversation, Jim struck me as a serious-minded guy, with strong ideas and clear focus, pursuing his insights and beliefs no matter the struggle. Good science and progress comes from that, making new paths in tough terrain, believing in the power of journey, as well as goal.”

The Medfly, smaller than a house fly, was first detected in California in 1975. It's considered the world's worst agricultural insect pest due to its wide distribution, wide range of hosts (its larvae infest more than 260 fruits and vegetables), and its ability to tolerate cool climates.

The Medfly prefers such thin-skinned hosts as peach, nectarine, apricot, avocado, grapefruit, orange, and cherry. The female may lay one to 10 eggs per fruit or as many as 22 eggs per day. She may lay up to 800 eggs during her lifetime, but usually about 300.

We remember when the Medfly wreaked economic havoc in the Solano County city of Dixon in September 2007. We were there.

At the time, Carey told us that "this may be just one of many isolated pockets of medfly infestations in California. This is really serious because the invasion process is so insidious."

The Medfly has been multiplying and spreading undetected--like cancer--for years, he said. "It may be a symptom of a much larger problem. But any way you look at it, this is the first really big outbreak in the Central Valley."

CDFA set up a command center at the Dixon May Fair and imposed a 114-mile radius quarantine of fruits, vegetables and nuts. Dixon was deep in the throes of tomato and walnut harvesting. The owner of a 65-acre organic produce farm that ships to 800 clients worried that he might lose $10,000 a week in potential sales.

Among the actions that the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) took at the onset:

Stripped all fruit from trees within a 100-meter radius of all Medfly finds

Ground-sprayed the organic compound Naturalyte (the active ingredient is Spinosad, a naturally occurring product of a soil bacteria) within a 200-meter radius of all Medfly finds

Set 1,700 fruit fly traps within an 81-square mile grid in all of Dixon and the surrounding area from near the Yolo County border to Midway Road

Began aerially releasing 1.5 million sterile male medflies (dyed pink for easy detection) over a 12-square mile area on Sept. 14, with weekly releases of 3 million medflies scheduled for at least nine months

Set up a yearlong command center, with four portable buildings and a task force of 25, on the Dixon May Fair grounds

Fast forward to today. Now that the Medfly has been declared a "permanent resident," what's next?

Carey agrees that “CDFA needs to continue to respond to outbreaks as they occur, but he advocates long-term planning based on “the science” that the insects are established. This includes heightened monitoring levels for the agriculturally rich Central Valley, an economic impact study, risk management/crop insurance, cropping strategies, fly fee zones/post harvest treatments, emergency/crisis planning, genetic analysis and a National Fruit Fly Program.

“Inasmuch as the Mediterranean, Mexican, Oriental, melon, guava and peach fruit flies have all been detected in the Central Valley, monitoring this incredibly important agricultural region should be increased by 5 to 10-fold in order to intervene and suppress populations and thus slow the spread,” Carey says.

“These pests cannot be wished away or legislated out of existence. Policymakers need to come to grips with this sobering reality of multiple species permanently established in our state in order to come up with a long-term, science-based policy for protecting agriculture in our state.”

(See James Carey's website for links to his work on fruit fly invasion.)

Professor James R. Carey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology will tell you why.

He will discuss the invasion of tropical fruit flies in California at his seminar from 12:05 to 1 p.m., Wednesday, April 3 in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison and Kleiber Hall drives.

Carey's seminar, titled "From Trickle to Flood: The Large-Scale, Cryptic Invasion of California by Tropical Fruit Flies," is the first in the department's spring-quarter seminar series. It's open to all interested persons, and it will be recorded and available for later viewing on UCTV.

"Despite aggressive and costly efforts by government agencies to prevent their introduction, establishment and spread, California has experienced an inexorable march of tropical fruit flies (Tephritidae) into the state with three-fold more species detected and thousands more flies captured than in all other mainland U.S. states combined," Carey says.

"Since 1954 when the first fly was detected a total of 17 species in 4 genera and 11,386 individuals (adults/larvae) have been detected at over 3,348 locations in 330 cities. My colleagues and I conclude from spatial mapping analyses of historical capture patterns and modeling that, despite the approximately 250 emergency eradication projects that have been directed against these pests by state and federal agencies, a minimum of 5 and as many as 9 or more tephritids are established and widespread. This list includes three of the most economically-important species in the world—the Mediterranean, Mexican and oriental fruit flies."

In his seminar, Carey will "outline and discuss the evidence for our conclusions with particular attention to the incremental, chronic, and insidious nature of the invasion involving ultra-small, barely-detectable populations. I will consider the more general implications of our results in scientific, economic, and operational contexts of invasion biology, as well as ethical issues concerned with the purposeful obfuscation of historical fruit fly detection data at individual, administrative and institutional levels."

Carey, former vice chair of the Department of Entomology, focuses his research on insect demography, mortality dynamics, and insect invasion biology. He received his bachelor and master of science degrees from Iowa State University (1973; 1975) and his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley (1980).

Highly recognized, he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Gerontological Society of America, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Entomological Society of America.

Carey is a noted authority on the invasion of the tropical fruit flies. He served on the California Department of Food and Agriculture's Medfly Scientific Advisory Panel from 1987-1994, testified to the California Legislature "Committee of the Whole" in 1990 on the Medfly Crisis in California, and authored the paper "Establishment of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly in California" (1992, Science 258, 457).

This year's recipient is Marc Tatar, an authority on the aging of insects.

Tatar, a professor in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown State University, Providence, R.I., will speak on “Integrated Control of Drosophila Aging by Insulin/IGF (Insulin-Like Growth Factor) Signaling” at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5 in Ballroom A of the Activities and Recreation Center (ARC), UC Davis campus. Prior to the presentation, a wine and cheese reception will take place from 5 to 6 p.m. outside of Ballroom A.

The event is open to all interested persons, said James R. Carey, UC Davis professor of entomology, who will introduce his former student. The presentation will be recorded for later posting on the UCTV seminars.

Tatar has studied the demography, evolution and genetics of aging working with a variety of insect systems to explore the regulation and basic mechanisms of life history traits and senescence. The current work in the Tatar laboratory focuses on genetic analysis of Drosophila to understand how insulin/IGF signals and lipid hormones regulate aging, and how these endocrine signals interact with nutrition.

Tatar received his doctorate in ecology from UC Davis in 1994 while with the Graduate Group in Ecology, working in James Carey's laboratory. Tatar obtained his bachelor’s degree in biology in 1980 from Earlham College, Richmond, Ind., and went on to receive his master’s degree in zoology from UC Davis in 1984. He completed postdoctoral research in genetics at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul before joining the Brown University faculty in 1997. He was promoted to professor in 2007.

While at UC Davis, Tatar was the 1994 recipient of the Merton Love Award for his Outstanding Dissertation in Ecology and Evolution. He is an Ellison Senior Scholar, founding joint editor-in-chief of the journal Aging Cell, and a past member of the Board of Review Editors for Science.

The Leigh seminar memorializes cotton entomologist Thomas Frances Leigh (1923-1993), an international authority on the biology, ecology and management of arthropod pests affecting cotton production. During his 37-year UC Davis career, Leigh was based at the Shafter Research and Extension Center, also known as the U.S. Cotton Research Station. He researched pest and beneficial arthropod management in cotton fields, and host plant resistance in cotton to insects, mites, nematodes and diseases.

Leigh, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 1958, retired in 1991 as an emeritus professor, but he continued to remain active in his research and collaboration until his death on Oct. 26, 1993.

At Shafter, Leigh focused his research on the biology, ecology, host plant resistance, control and management of insects and spider mites on cotton. He stood at the forefront of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) of cotton pests, according to an article in the summer 1994 edition of American Entomologist. He taught courses on cotton IPM and host plant resistance.

In his memory, his family and associates set up the Leigh Distinguished Alumni Seminar Entomology Fund at the UC Davis Department of Entomology. When his wife, Nina, died in 2002, the alumni seminar became known as the Thomas and Nina Distinguished Alumni Seminar.

Thanks to the Leigh family, outstanding UC Davis alumni return to campus to share their accomplishments.

Those are some of the topics to be covered at the UC Davis Department of Entomology's fall noonhour seminars, to begin Wednesday, Oct. 17 and continue through Wednesday, Nov. 28 in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Building.

Assistant professors Joanna Chiu and Brian Johnson of the UC Davis Department of Entomology are coordinating the fall noonhour seminars.

All seminars will be held every Wednesday except for Nov. 14. No seminar will be held that day. That's during the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting, which will take place Nov. 11-14 in Knoxville, Tenn.

The good news is that if you cannot attend these seminars, not to worry. Professor James R. Carey is arranging the videotaping of the seminars. They will be be broadcast at a later date on UCTV. Meanwhile, if you missed any of the previous ones, most can be accessed on UCTV.

Nov. 28: James Mallet, professor, Harvard UniversityTitle: "Hybridization, Mimicry and the Origin of Species in HeliconiusButterflies"Host: Gregory Lanzaro, professor, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

The first speaker, evolutionary biologist Tim Linksvayer, will focus on superorganisms. Honey bees are considered superorganisms.

"Individuals in insect societies are inextricably linked by social interactions,” Linksvayer writes in his abstract. “Colony-level social networks coordinate individual function and colony homeostasis just as physiological networks coordinate tissue function and homeostasis within individuals. As a result, social insect colonies are often described as ‘superorganisms’ composed of organisms that function together more-or-less as a unit. This characteristic is thought to have led to the remarkable ecological and evolutionary success of the social insects.

"Despite these conspicuous superorganismal properties and the inherent hierarchical organization of life in insect societies (i.e. colony-level, organismal-level), most previous studies of the evolutionary genetic and molecular basis of social insect traits use the same reductionist approaches that have been developed for solitary organisms, where an individual’s traits are only influenced by its own genome. More realistically, in social organisms, an individual’s traits are the property of the genomes of all social group members. I will discuss ongoing integrative research studying how social interactions in ants and honey bees affect the expression and evolution of individual- and group-level traits."

Stay tuned!

Honey bees are considered a superorganism. Here worker bees form a retinue around the queen. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Honey bees are considered a superorganism. Here worker bees form a retinue around the queen. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

James R. Carey, professor of entomology at the UC Davis Department of Entomology (the department co-sponsored the event), webcast the six talks presented by either current or retired UC Davis professors. The videos are now on UCTV; here's the link to the Honey! index page.

Meanwhile, you can learn about bees from some of the country's best: two UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty and one emeritus. Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen discussed "The Wonder of Honey Bees" and later presented a talk about honey and honey tasting.

By the end of the day, the crowd agreed with Mussen that “Honey bees are truly marvelous.” And with Johnson who pointed out: “Bees have small brains but can solve big problems."

A nice addition: a honey-tasting contest judged by the attendees. The winner? An oh-so-good clover honey from Sacramento Beekeeping Supplies. The honey (yes, it's available for sale at the 2110 X St. business), was produced by the Jones Bee Company, Salt Lake City. Second place went to Alan Pryor of Alameda; and third place, Diane Kriletich of Paloma, Calaveras County.

“It was a sweet day all in all,” said coordinator Clare Hasler-Lewis, executive director of RMI.